qstat -u aleonard -s z
(William Gibson said that, I believe).
I see echoes of Toyota teaching its Toyota Production System in Google’s recent release of information about their data centers. Relatively straightforward concepts – the challenge is in adapting your existing systems to them.
First came Sun’s Project Blackbox; now Rackable Systems has their data-center-in-a-shipping container product, Concentro. Both appear to have put a lot of effort into solving the problem of cooling the extremely densely packed equipment within the container – Rackable’s design that eliminates the need for system-level fans is particularly neat. According to the Register, both Sun and Rackable claim to have already have customers lined up for their respective products, but for what must be the vast majority of their clients, this is space-shot stuff – and those clients’ businesses are more about getting across town than getting to the moon.
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